Art history: Goya

The Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) and the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) were almost exact contemporaries. Both lived through a time of upheaval, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. And both died in exile, Goya in France and David in Belgium.

La maja desnuda (circa 1797–1800), known in English as The Naked (or Nude) Maja by Francisco de Goya (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Goya pushed open the doors of Romanticism; David remained within the disciplined Classical style to the end of his life. Goya was an intuitive artist. He went straight to his canvases without doing preparatory studies. Trained in the French Academy, David did sketches before he applied paint to his canvases.

As you read in last week’s post, David became the leading painter of the French Revolution at its beginnings. He was a victim of its convulsions when he was imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre in 1794. From this time to the end of his life, he was caught up in political forces unleashed by the 1789 Revolution. His art is unintelligible outside the politics of his lifetime.

Goya had achieved official favor when he experienced a nearly fatal illness in 1792 that left him completely deaf. He did a series of tinplate paintings during his recovery. They show a shipwreck, lunatics in an asylum, robbers murdering passengers in a stagecoach, and a bullfight. He traveled to Seville to install a religious painting after his recovery. While he was there he received a summons to visit one of the most beautiful women in Spain, the Duchess of Alba, whose husband had just died. Goya’s work when he spent the summer of 1796 at the Alba estate suggests that he had an affair with her. What is certain is that when he returned to Madrid Goya was a different artist. It was as if he had been reborn.

The Family of Charles IV by Francisco Goya (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The leading reformer in Spain, Jovellanos, whose favor Goya had enjoyed before his illness, had just become the leading political figure in Spain. He secured a commission for Goya, decorating the interior of a Franciscan chapel in Madrid, San Antonio de la Florida. It is one of Goya’s great achievements. As a political liberal, Jovellanos wanted to carry out a reform program in Spain. He would carry out land reform and reform of the Church. In the liberal atmosphere in 1797-98 Madrid, Goya compiled a set of etchings, the Caprichos, that included bitingly satirical commentaries on Spanish superstition and backwardness. By the time Goya completed the Caprichos, Jovellanos had been swept from office and sent to his estate. In effect he was under house arrest.

It was at this point that Goya painted The Family of Charles IV, a remarkable depiction of a stupid king, the wife who cuckolded him, and the son who despised his parents and the man who slept with the Queen. Goya also painted the queen’s lover, Manuel Godoy. Having done a series of portraits for the royal family Goya left the court and became the leading portraitist in Madrid.

This changed when one of Napoleon’s armies occupied Spain in 1808. A French army provoked an uprising in Madrid on May 2. French soldiers executed Spanish insurgents on May 3. Goya’s paintings of these episodes are among his best-known works. He did a series of etchings, the Disasters of War, that some, myself included, consider the most harrowing record ever compiled by any artist of the brutality of war.

The artist who compiled this record had experienced personal anguish earlier when he had a nearly fatal illness that left him stone-deaf. He had depicted scenes of human folly in his Caprichos. Now he depicted folly on the largest scale of all, warfare of a particularly savage type waged by guerillas (the word comes from this time and place) against a modern army. Goya had shown cruelty and stupidity before; he now pulled out the stops. He showed body parts hanging from broken trees, French soldiers raping Spanish women, Spanish women retaliating against their tormentors, and civilians fleeing from marauding armies. One of the etchings in this series is entitled “I Saw This.”

Goya’s etching Yo lo vi (I saw this)

Yo lo vi (I saw this)

Goya’s Disasters of War came out of his experience in Spain during a time of savage warfare. They came also out of his inner experience in the years before the Napoleonic war in Spain. His art moved into areas of creativity previously unexplored, by him or any other artist. Goya responded to the Spanish crisis with remarkable directness and vividness. It is unsparing in its effects.

The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya, showing Spanish resisters being executed by Napoleon’s troops. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a liberal, Goya was under suspicion when Ferdinand VII was restored to his throne in 1814. A series of etchings and another of drawings depict his responses to this king and his cruelties. Goya’s art continued to evolve. Precisely when David’s art lost its vitality, Goya’s work deepened. He bought a house just outside Madrid whose interior he decorated with paintings, a witch’s Sabbath, a gruesome holiday procession, Saturn devouring man, and two men beating one another to death as they sink into quicksand, rather than helping one another.

A revolution broke out in Spain in 1820. Ferdinand was forced to accept a liberal constitution. A French army invaded Spain in 1823 and restored Ferdinand to power. He had promised amnesty to his captors if they would accept his authority as king. When a French army rescued him he ordered the death of the leader of the revolution. He was placed in a cart that was tied to an ass’s tail and taken to a public square. He was hung and his body was cut into five pieces and placed on public display. The body parts were then sent to other cities and placed on public display.

Goya left Spain. He spent the last five years of his life in France, a liberal in exile. He continued to push ahead as an artist. He tried new techniques and was fully alive and alert as an artist to the very end. In one of his late drawings he depicts an old man, bent over as he leaned on a stick. He has a long beard but there is a glint in his eye. Goya’s artistic growth was continual. He underwent continuous renewal. He died three years after David and the year after Beethoven.

Warren Roberts

2 Responses

These posts are always so fascinating and interesting. Little reminders of being in class years ago. I have a Spanish style apartment down here in Tucson. I might perhaps hang up a Goya somewhere that is fitting.
Hope all is well.

Hi Jean-Marie, and thanks for reading my blogs. I have retired and spend half of the year in Florida; I miss the classroom, particularly when students like you and Angelica were there. I mentioned you to Gordon Gallup when I saw him in the hall; he smiled. Hope all is well with you.

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